Check it out–very worthwhile.

Consider a few facts. Voodoo is one of the official religions of Haiti, and its designation in 2003 merely granted official acknowledgment to a longstanding reality. The slave revolt that brought Haiti independence indeed relied on voodoo, the New World version of ancestral African faiths. To this day, by various scholarly estimates, 50 percent to 95 percent of Haitians practice at least elements of voodoo, often in conjunction with Catholicism.

Yet in searching the LexisNexis database of news coverage and doing a Google search this week, I found that Catholicism figured into three times as many accounts of the quake as did voodoo. A substantial share of the reports that did mention voodoo were recounting Mr. Robertson’s canard or adopting it in articles asking Haitian survivors if they felt their country was cursed.

At a putatively more informed level, articles, broadcasts and blogs depicted voodoo as the source of Haiti’s poverty and political instability ”” not because of divine punishment, mind you, but because voodoo supposedly is fatalistic and primitive by nature.

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The Jan. 12 earthquake was an equal opportunity leveler with such mass deadliness that it erased the individuality of its victims. According to the Haitian government, more than 230,000 people died in the disaster, but initially few had ceremonies to mark their deaths. Even the collective loss of life was not memorialized until this past weekend, when the government imposed a national period of mourning.

Bit by bit, though, the individual losses are coming into focus for Haitians finally ready to grieve. Many victims were not accepted as dead until the search missions were over, and many bodies were never recovered or were dumped in mass graves. But belatedly, funerals and memorial services are taking place daily, and the traditional word-of-mouth network known as telediol has reawakened, delivering death notices.

If Haiti, always stoic, first seemed too stunned to cry, the tears are rolling now for those who seem irreplaceable: the tax man who wrote software to detect fraud in a corrupt society; the gallery owner whose eminent Haitian art collection perished with her; the writer who translated the culture’s oral storytelling into prose; the feminist leaders; the nursing students; the factory workers; the teachers; and the children, especially the children.

“My little girls died at the very moment I was making plans for their future,” said Frantz Thermilus, the chief of Haiti’s National Judicial Police, caressing their pictures on his cellphone. “And the future of the children is the future of Haiti.”

Read the whole article.

The number of dead from Haiti’s earthquake has been estimated as high as 200,000. That’s nearly 7 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince. Imagine the entire population of Des Moines, Iowa, vaporized.

This is a country that observes death with elaborate ceremony. But with most of the bodies hauled to mass graves or still entombed in fallen buildings, normal funeral rituals are impossible.

All over Port-au-Prince, the places that usually play an integral role in burial customs are eerily empty.

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For Haitians in particular, the mass graves are wrenching. [Karen] Richman says Haitians place significant emphasis on dying with dignity and holding a funeral, a process that can take nine days. Relationships with the dead last forever; survivors believe their ancestors visit them in their dreams and give them guidance.

“Every culture has its way of making sense of the beginning and end of life. Our rituals are the way we control what these events mean to us: Irish wakes, Jews saying the Kaddish prayer, Hindu processions,” she says.

Although the Catholic Church frowns on voodoo culture, it is pervasive in Haiti, where many are buried with both Catholic and voodoo rites. “Every family inherits the spirits their ancestors worshiped,” Richman says. “You need to communicate with the ancestors to reach these spirits or souls. You need to know they have been respected.”

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John Pipkin is a retired pilot. He’s held many jobs, most recently working for Netjets International, flying celebrities around.

These days, he flies relief workers, medical teams and humanitarian aid from airstrip to airstrip in Haiti.

His wife, Joyce, is the volunteer coordinator of the Haitian ministry at their church, St. Mary’s Episcopal in Columbia, which sponsors a parish and its school in Les Cayes, a town in the southwest section of the country.

The Pipkins travel together at least three times a year helping the needy, coordinating mission work, assisting the international community of aid workers and supporting local clergy. They visited Charleston Southern University on Wednesday to share their story.

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It is important to maintain two contradictory attitudes at once in many areas of Christian theology, and this is one of those areas. These are the two clashing points of view in this case:

Point of view #1: The creation does declare the glory of God, and the “Thunderstorm Psalm” (#29: “The Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon”) proclaims that message magnificently. God is not only the Creator but also the One who rules over the cosmos. The theophany in the book of Job (chs. 38-41) is the preeminent biblical passage treating of this subject, and the phrase “the doors of the sea” is derived from 38:8. Many people have experienced a sort of theophany–a manifestation of the power of God–even in the midst of destruction; people have testified to this even when they have had to face the dire consequences of a natural catastrophe (there are examples of this in Isaac’s Storm, the book about the hurricane that destroyed Galveston, and in David McCullough’s account of the Johnstown Flood). So the wild, untamed aspect of nature can be either comforting or exhilarating or both, depending on one’s point of view.

Point of view #2: At the same time, nature is not benign. Nature is “red in tooth and claw.” Nature, like the human race, is fallen and is subject to the powers of the evil one who continues to occupy this sphere. Flannery O’Connor wrote that her work was about the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil; we should not fail to realize that “nature” is part of that occupied territory. Nature is often hostile, as Annie Dillard has so powerfully shown us, and the nature-worshippers among us fail to acknowledge this hostility in their pantheistic enthusiasm. Only by action of the Creator will the peaceable kingdom arrive, where the lion lies down with the lamb (isn’t it suggestive that “Lion of Judah” and “Lamb of God” are both titles of our Lord?)

The conflict between these two realities cannot be resolved in this life. Does the Creator of all that is have the power to say to those tectonic plates, “Be still!” Of course. Then why doesn’t he? Why does he permit earthquakes in the poorest country in the hemisphere?

We do not know.

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[BOB] ABERNETHY: When people come to you and say where was God in what happened in Haiti, what do you tell them?

[RABBI JACK] MOLINE: The glib answer is to just say God was there. But I was walking through the synagogue the other day and a couple of kids were horsing around. One of them bumped her head and started to cry. Her friend immediately apologized, and I walked over and gave her a hug. I wasn’t able to stop the pain, but I was able to share it with her a little bit, as was her friend. I think that’s where God is””sharing that pain.

ABERNETHY: With the people who are suffering, suffering with them?

MOLINE: With the people who are suffering. Absolutely.

Read or watch it all.

Watch it all–wonderful stuff.

[Interviewer]This is an appalling tragedy, the UN are saying that it may well be the biggest natural disaster in history. How do we reconcile our faith with this terrible tragedy on this scale?

ABY: I think it is not an easy thing to reconcile, the heart of it because it is just so so awful and the people suffering terribly. We tend to look for answers actually where there are sometimes no answers.

I think the reconciliation for me comes in my understanding of God as I see him in Jesus Christ. A God who is almighty and powerful is born like a little baby, grows up and is crucified, doing for us that which we can not do for ourselves. On the cross you hear him say “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” But that’s not the end. He rises from death, conquering evil and death and pointing out to us that actually in the end it is life in God which matters. So a God who has becomes like one of us, dies, rises, sends his Spirit, that we may be forgiven for the wrongs we have done in the past, and given new life in the present and hope for the future.

That kind of a God is neither to be seen as the sort of grand puppet master who just pulls pulleys nor is he a Dr Who, or a Wonderwoman or Superman but actually a God who is there with us. Rabbi Hugo Gryn was a survivor of the Holocaust and was asked the same question “Where was God when the Jews were being gassed? Why did he allow it to happen?” and Rabbi Hugo Gryn said “God in those gas chambers was being violated and blasphemed”. That God is always around us, with us, suffering with us and giving us the hope that in tragedy and death and things we can’t explain – in the end these things are not the end.

Read the whole thing (or use the audio link at the bottom).

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It was a blessing for me to encounter the theologian Austin Farrer a year before his sudden death. With him, I was one handshake away from his friends Tolkien, Lewis, and Sayers. In reflecting on natural disasters and God’s action in the world, he said with stark realism that in an earthquake, God’s will is that the elements of the Earth’s crust should behave in accordance with their nature. He was speaking of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, which killed about the same number of people counted so far in devastated Haiti. Most were killed in churches on All Saints Day, which gave license to rationalists of the “Enlightenment” to mock the doctrine of a good God. Atheists can suddenly pretend to be theologians puzzled by the contradictory behavior of a benevolent God. On the other extreme, doltish TV evangelists summon a half-baked Calvinism to say that people who get hit hard deserve it.

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The only people who would seem to have the right to invoke God at the moment are the Haitians themselves, who beseech his help amidst dreadful pain. They, too, alas, appear to wander the wasteland of theodicy. News reports have described some Haitians giving voice to a worldview uncomfortably close to Pat Robertson’s, in which a vengeful God has been meting out justified retribution: “I blame man. God gave us nature, and we Haitians, and our governments, abused the land. You cannot get away without consequences,” one man told The Times last week.

Others sound like a more frankly theological President Obama: a 27-year-old survivor, Mondésir Raymone, was quoted thus: “We have survived by the grace of God.” Bishop Éric Toussaint, standing near his damaged cathedral, said something similar: “Why give thanks to God? Because we are here. What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.” A survivor’s gratitude is combined with theological fatalism. This response is entirely understandable, uttered in a ruined landscape beyond the experience of most of us, and a likely source of pastoral comfort to the bishop’s desperate flock. But that should not obscure the fact that it is little more than a piece of helpless mystification, a contradictory cry of optimistic despair.

Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are, at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.

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The Episcopal Diocese of Haiti is caring for close to 23,000 Haitians in at least 21 encampments around the earthquake-devastated country.

The information came Jan. 23 in a letter from Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin to Episcopal Relief & Development President Robert Radtke and posted here. In the letter, Duracin said that the diocese and the organization are working “hand-in-hand,” telling Radtke he has “complete confidence in you and your agency.”

“Please tell our partners, the people of the Episcopal Church, the people of the United States and indeed the people of the world that we in Haiti are immensely grateful for their prayers, their support and their generosity,” Duracin wrote. “This is a desperate time in Haiti; we have lost so much. But we still have the most important asset, the people of God, and we are working continuously to take care of them.”

Read the whole article.

Though some 80 percent of Haiti’s 9 million people are professed Catholics and 16 percent are Protestants, roughly half of the total population practices Vodou, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.

Like many other indigenous religions, it has its high form and folk form, priests and rituals, according to June McDaniel, religion professor at the College of Charleston. It derives from several African cultures, including the Yoruba, and equates its gods and goddesses with Catholic saints.

For example, Legba, the messenger of the gods and a force of destiny, is thought to live at the crossroads of the spirit and material worlds. He is a doorkeeper and, thus, associated with St. Peter.

According to the beliefs, Vodou gods, or loas, live on an underwater island with the souls of the dead, McDaniel said. They are able to communicate with the living who are eager to make contact. To do so, people pray and perform various rituals.

Read the whole thing.

How did you get involved with Haiti?

I first went to Haiti 12 years ago with my friend, Anne Fairbanks, a Skidmore professor who founded the Haiti mission at our church in Troy 25 years ago. I took over the job from Anne in 2005 after I retired. Anne died last year at 85, but I’m so grateful she introduced me to Haiti. I’d never been to a Third World country when Anne dragged me along to Haiti in 1998 and it was an eye-opener for me. I fell in love with the people in Haiti at the church we sponsored, particularly the teachers, who worked so hard for so little money. Since then, I’ve made seven trips to Haiti.”

How does your church support your partner parish in Haiti?

Our members have been very generous to Haiti over the years and we send about $5,000 a year in donations. We’ve purchased school supplies, musical instruments and raised salaries for the teachers. We’ve helped improve the quality of the school in many ways, including expanding it to K-12 and a student body of 350 boys and girls. When I first visited, the fourth- and fifth-graders were barely reading. This year, every single one of the students in 12th grade passed the national exam. Every day at noon, volunteer ladies from the church make beans and rice for lunch. For many of the kids, it’s the only food they’ll get all day. They love sardines on it, which didn’t really appeal to me, but I started bringing cans of sardines on every visit. Every student gets a sardine on the top of their beans and rice and it’s a huge treat for them.

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Last week’s earthquake has devastated Haiti, and prompted a massive relief effort. In a smaller but almost equally intense way, the disaster has pervaded every part of the school day for the 510 students ”” 80 percent of them Haitian ”” at SS. Joachim and Anne, the Roman Catholic elementary school in Queens Village, Queens, a hub of New York’s Haitian community.

They pray. They scrounge up donations. The quake informs class discussions about politics, about helping the poor, about the afterlife. And when the children are not talking about it, their teachers suspect, they are thinking about it.

As classmates played with cubes on Wednesday, learning to add, Michael Constant, 6, squirmed in his seat. His mother had just left for Haiti that morning to bury his father.

As 250,000 Haitian-Americans in the New York area mourn, children bear their own burdens. Many feel as much at home in Haiti as in New York. They struggle to picture the houses where they spent summers now in rubble, grandparents and cousins dead, missing, homeless. For others, Haiti exists in tales parents tell ”” a place they long to visit and now wonder if they will ever see.

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Voodoo is playing a central role in helping Haitians cope with their unthinkable tragedy. Outside of Haitian culture, few know what Voodoo is. Elizabeth McAlister, a Voodoo expert at Wesleyan University, says at its core, the philosophy is really pretty simple.

“Voodoo in a nutshell is about the idea that everything material has a spiritual dimension that is more real” than physical reality, she says. “So everything living ”” but even rocks and the Earth ”” is considered to have spirit and have a spiritual nature.”

McAlister says there is no unified Voodoo religion. There’s no “Voodoo Pope” or central authority, no Voodoo scripture or even a core doctrine.

Read or listen to it all.

When I was introduced to the congregation by the lay leader, Faubert Baptiste, he spoke one sentence in English for my benefit and then a sentence in French for the congregants.

“We have never had a bishop here,” he said. “We are glad you have come.” With Faubert’s help, I offered words of consolation and support. When I announced that I would be reading from Psalm 46, everyone immediately took out their Bibles and rose to their feet.

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea … the Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.”

Following my comments, another lay member, Lucien Jendy, came forward to bring the sermon for the day. He read from Matthew 24: “As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the building of the temple. Then he asked them, ”˜You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another, all will be thrown down.’”

He explained every word of the Bible is true, and that our earthly buildings and our lives are temporary. He stressed that in life we will have suffering, but those who endure to the end will be saved.

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Did God abandon Haiti?

No, say its people of faith — and there are many here in a place without much beyond faith. The earthquake was a sign of God’s presence.

So, it should be no surprise that on a narrow street choked by debris, outside a church with a shattered ceiling open to the morning sky, what was left of the congregation of Haiti’s Second Baptist Church stood in a courtyard and waved their hands in the air and shouted, “Victoire! Victoire!”

Victory.

Read the whole article.

Caritas search and rescue teams Jan. 19 miraculously found and pulled five people from the rubble of the badly damaged Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, where they had been clinging to life for seven days.

The first to be rescued, Enu Zizi, was pulled out by expert teams from Mexico and South Africa who worked for two hours to extract her. Caritas officials said she suffered injuries to her hips and possibly a broken leg, but “was not critically injured.”

Zizi told her rescuers, “I love you,” upon being pulled from the rubble.

Wow–read it all.

Humans are meaning-seeking creatures. We search for patterns and, if we don’t see them, we imagine them. We put all sorts of pieces together, whether by instinct, sentiment or scientific evidence.

Now, the biggest pattern of all ”” God ”” has come within our scientific purview.

Neuroscientists such as Andrew Newberg are telling us that we are “wired for God.” That belief is part of our brain structure, which is an often heard but still controversial point of view.

There’s even a term that has been invented for this type of researcher: neurotheologians.

They are St. Augustines with medical degrees and brain scanners. They take religion seriously, as a research project.

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In the face of the tragedy in Haiti, I want to make a proposal. It’s not a realistic proposal, I grant; but it is a serious one. My proposal is this: that all those Anglicans involved in litigation amongst one another in North America ”” both in the Episcopal Church and those outside of TEC; in the Anglican Church of Canada, and those outside ”” herewith cease all court battles over property. And, having done this, they do two further things:

a. devote the forecast amount they were planning to spend on such litigation to the rebuilding of the Episcopal Church and its people in Haiti; and

b. sit down with one another, prayerfully and for however long it takes, and with whatever mediating and facilitating presence they accept, and agree to a mutually agreed process for dealing with contested property.

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Rejecting offers to evacuate him from Port-au-Prince, Episcopal Diocese of Haiti Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin said Jan. 18 that he must remain in the Haitian capital.

“No, I will stay with my people,” the Rev. Lauren Stanley, one of four Episcopal Church missionaries assigned to the Haitian diocese, told ENS the bishop said in response to the evacuation offer.

Stanley was home in Virginia when the magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck just before 5:00 p.m. local time Jan. 12 and has been monitoring diocesan reports from there.

“The people are strong,” Duracin told Stanley, echoing messages she has received from other priests. “We still have our people, and they are strong. We need to help them.”

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Ruth Pierre wept before the congregation of a small Haitian church in Mattapan yesterday, mourning her uncle, who was killed in the earthquake that has left her impoverished homeland in ruins.

But Pierre said she is also grateful for those who survived, for those who have been rescued from the rubble that has paralyzed Haiti.

“My uncle died, but God saved many others,’’ said Pierre, 25, one of a dozen members of Church of the Nazarene who reflected on their families and loved ones during the 11 a.m. weekly service. “Thank you, God. I pray there are more found.’’

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Like other ministers in churches with Haitian-American congregations across the USA, the Rev. David Eugene took to the pulpit of his north Miami church Sunday and sought to offer solace to his worried, grieving flock.

“I preached from Deuteronomy, chapter 31, verse 8, and the title of my sermon was ‘I will not forsake you,’ ” said Eugene, pastor of Haitian Evangelical Baptist Church. “The second part of the text was Psalms 46, verses 1 and 2 ”” ‘The Lord is my refuge, my help and my strength.’

“It was very emotional. There was some crying,” he said.

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Two Episcopal Church missionaries in Port-au-Prince say that they feared for their lives during the Jan. 12 earthquake and in its aftermath that shook the Haitian capital.

When the magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit just before 5 p.m. local time, the Rev. Canon Oge Beauvoir and his wife Serrette were in their Port-au-Prince home, he told Nathan Brockman of Trinity Wall Street in a Jan. 15 telephone call.

“For the first time I was certain I faced death,” Beauvoir told Brockman. “I was certain we were going to die.”

Beauvoir, 53, is the dean of the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti’s seminary.

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With their churches flattened, their priests killed and their Bibles lost amid the rubble of their homes, desperate Haitians prayed in the streets on Sunday, raising their arms in the air and asking God to ease their grief.

Outside the city’s main cathedral, built in 1750 but now a giant pile of twisted metal, shattered stained glass and cracked concrete, parishioners held a makeshift service at the curb outside, not far from where scores of homeless people were camping out in a public park. The bishop’s sermon of hope was a hard sell, though, as many listening had lost their relatives, their homes and their possessions.

“We have to keep hoping,” said Bishop Marie Eric Toussant, although he acknowledged that he had no resources to help his many suffering parishioners and did not know whether the historic cathedral would ever be rebuilt. He said the quake had toppled the residences where priests stayed, crushing many of them.

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